Haunted Legends Read Online Free

Customers were sparse up front. The bartender and the server looked bored.
    As I got up and stepped away from the table, I had the last of the pills in my hand. I wandered toward the rear, chewing it, sipping my flat soda water.
    The velvet cord that would have blocked access to the upper floors hung on a hook. I went up the stairs quickly, not really thinking about what I was doing. The second floor was dimly lit but I could see a perfectly ordinary banquet/reception room. The Major was right about the building having been gutted. They must have raised the ceiling, probably taken most of the third story to do that.
    The windows that would have overlooked the uninspiring streetscape were covered over. On all four walls were murals of vaguely “ye olde New York” themes: paintings of carriages and town houses, sailing ships in the harbor, all against the background of a city where church steeples still dominated the landscape. No old oils of the Dutchman were on view, however.
    Then I heard a noise and looked around. A door I hadn’t noticed swung open. A figure, big and bald, was backing through it: I saw Van Brunt and froze.
    But that only lasted until the guy turned and was revealed as olive-skinned, possibly Latino, possibly Middle Eastern. He was burly, maybe thirty, with a shaved head and a cardboard box under one arm. He may have been the manager or maybe one of the owners.
    He locked the door behind him—no doubt they used what remained of the upper floors as storage—and then saw me. “Hey, guy,” the accent was hard to place. “We’re closed up here.”
    Keeping the slight smile and careful distance of someone used to herding drunks, he gestured for me to precede him down the stairs. “Plenty of room here,” he said as he walked past our table.
    The Major caught all that, guessed where I’d been, and gave a satisfied little nod.
    Jay Glass, waving a scotch and soda for emphasis, was saying, “I think Van Brunt had a curse handed down from Brom Bones, maybe earlier. But to him it wasn’t a curse. He reveled in being as complete and utter a monster as possible. Where the ancestor won Katrina Van Tassel by evoking the Headless Horseman, he did the same with anybody who crossed his path.”
    The Major said, “We think of ghosts as coming from the past but maybe they exist altogether apart from Time.”
    The others nodded with sage, drunken understanding and I saw that the group session had gone to another place.
    Mimsey Friedman spoke up. “I saw Van Brunt, maybe ten years ago.” I was about to say he would have been dead for some years. Then I looked at everyone’s intent expressions and shut up.
    “My marriage to Joachim had finally crashed and burned,” she said, and I remembered hearing she had broken up with a European designer about then. “Boris and John were wonderful to me. They have a lovely little farm on the Hudson near the Mohawk Valley and I stayed there a lot that summer.
    “It’s not a working farm of course, but they have gardens and a small herd of sheep, gray ones with lovely black faces—quite decorative—that graze in the fields. They had geese in a pond and an old retired New York City Police horse named Crispin, the gentlest animal in the world. He’d nuzzle you until you yielded up the sugar lumps he knew you had.
    “They had a local man who came by and took care of the animals. I never much noticed him—he was quite anonymous. Then, at the end of the summer, he had to be away and he got someone to take his place. I remember it was a hazy August afternoon. There was thunder up in the mountains but no lightning or rain.
    “I saw a figure walking across the pasture toward Crispin and something about him was so familiar. He noticed me at the same time, paused, and turned to look my way. It was Bud Van Brunt and he stared at me for a long moment like he knew who I was and wanted me to know he was there.
    “I packed and left that day. Boris and John eventually persuaded me